It’s not knowledge, skills, degrees or intelligence that separates the best founders from the rest — it could be a quality that is quite possible to cultivate.
Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and one of history’s most celebrated entrepreneurs, offered this candid reflection on what truly distinguishes successful founders from those who fail — perseverance. Speaking from experience about the brutal realities of building a company, Jobs delivered insights that cut through the romantic mythology surrounding entrepreneurship to reveal an uncomfortable truth: starting a company is overwhelmingly difficult work that demands an almost irrational commitment to continue.
“I’ve forgotten how much work it actually is to start a company,” Jobs admitted with characteristic honesty. “It’s a lot of work, and you’ve gotta do everything. You’ve gotta come up with a name, you’ve gotta come up with a logo. I mean, in addition to designing the product, you’ve gotta figure out what to design. You’ve gotta figure out how you’re gonna get it to the marketplace.”
The scope of entrepreneurial responsibility extends far beyond the glamorous vision of innovation. “You’ve gotta do a part number system. You’ve gotta go get bank accounts, you’ve gotta set up charts, general ledgers, get a management information system, get a little kitchen set up, get a coffee maker, all this stuff. It’s a lot of work,” Jobs continued, painting a picture of the mundane yet essential tasks that consume a founder’s early days.
Then came his central thesis: “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You pour so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that most people give up.”
Jobs understood that technical brilliance or market insight alone wouldn’t sustain entrepreneurs through the inevitable valleys of despair. “So you gotta have an idea and a problem or a wrong that you wanna right, that you’re passionate about. Otherwise, you’re not gonna have the perseverance to stick it through because it’s so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up.”
The Apple founder emphasized the sustained nature of entrepreneurial struggle: “It’s really hard and you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it and you don’t really love it, you’re gonna give up.”
These observations prove remarkably prescient when viewed against today’s startup landscape. Recent data shows that approximately 90% of startups fail, with many founders citing burnout and loss of motivation as factors. The current venture capital environment, marked by tighter funding conditions and higher scrutiny, has only intensified the perseverance requirement Jobs described. Companies like Airbnb, which survived near-bankruptcy by selling cereal boxes, or Twitter, which pivoted multiple times before finding its voice, exemplify how persistence through seemingly impossible circumstances separates eventual success stories from the statistical majority that quit. Jobs’ insight suggests that while the entrepreneurial ecosystem has evolved dramatically since Apple’s garage days, the fundamental human challenge of sustaining irrational optimism through rational despair remains the entrepreneur’s most critical skill.